Archive for January, 2012

I was shown this video recently of an Evan Dando solo show where he plays this song with Tom Morgan and Nic Dalton backing. It’s nice. For this Lemonheads fan who is prejudicially not a Lemonheads fan and therefore finds other ways to enjoy them, like crediting everything good about them to someone not Evan or going back to their earliest stuff when they were not the same band as they were when most successful, it’s great to see this song given life. Conflicting, too. It makes me wish i had gone to see an Evan Dando solo show.

This must have left some impact on me. It was the winning song from the 2007 Eurovision, which became the last i ever got to see through us losing our SBS reception and me somehow never being home Eurovision weekend. And i haven’t heard it since. This song was the Serbian entry and set itself apart from the competition by being a ballad, its stage having no choreography, and the song being sung entirely in its home language. That’s all i remember of it, and, Eurovision being what it is to us, it’s the only Marija Šerifović song i’ve ever heard despite her having i’m sure a very successful and prolific career.

The first Comet Gain song?! Yikes. This thing is really not at all indicative of what i listen to outside of it. Well i guess it is, but there are bands who haven’t shown up here that by all sound logic should have left some trace given the amount of time i spend with them. Comet Gain for one. These singles that tided us over in the gap between City Fallen Leaves (where i got on) and last year’s Howl Of The Lonely Crowd are wonderful things indeed. Little reminders that they were still a band, every bit as much still Comet Gain – that there exists a Comet Gain in this world.

The best thing about Sweet Baby, apart from the songs, is the way Dallas and Matt share lead vocal duties. The same melody line and lyrics sung with the same notes and the same urgency. It doesn’t always happen – Matt often settling into backing up, harmonising or yelping, and that obviously being his role in the band – but when it does, when this unison troubadouring attack of love and devotion issues from them, it’s a magical thing indeed.

So the Douglas Sirk, Preston Sturges or [better example] (to twist a dream of auteurism to somewhere it doesn’t really exist) of dramas, or the Shadow Morton of K-pop. This is again from You’re Beautiful, done by the fictional band the show’s based around. They’re really popular in the show but i’ll never get it, just like i will never get CNBlue or F.T. Island. These names…

I’m coming to a point in my life where i’m beginning to realise that i do have dreams regarding what i want to do with it and maybe for once i should pursue them, no matter how stupid and unattainable they are. A desperate point. I’m getting old and i’ve spent that getting old thinking small, thinking safe, thinking dull, thinking that which i would have to try and exert the least, and i haven’t even made it there. I’m going back to school soon, but i think even that is filing in for an unimaginative, direct, inferior career path.

What i would like to do… ready?.. Really, one thing i would like to do is write for television. Specifically Korean television. I want to write dramas. That is what i want to do. I have good ideas, and i believe the only place suitable for and accepting of these ideas is Korean television. Maybe there are other places. It sure ain’t Australia. What walls i put up for myself.

What walls? There are things i have to do. Flesh out these ideas for starters – actually write something. There are probably academic credentials i should get as well. But beyond all that there’s me being a non-Korean wanting to enter an industry where the only white people seem to be English teachers recruited as background actors for scenes set overseas. No matter how universal love, romance, comedy and drama may be, i would have to learn the language and all sense of filial duty, social propriety, the way the country – geography, infrastructure, history and culture – positions people, and the (to us) weird, open relation to bodily functions, especially poop.

There are many ways this dream is closed to me, but thinking that way is not going to get me anywhere. It’s an industry that will thrive without me, but still one i would like so much to enter. And one i believe i can contribute to. It’s an industry that has a proper path to follow for those to be where i want to be, and i am not on it. Maybe i can Cyrano de Bergerac my scripts to someone. I don’t mind giving up credit. This song is from the 2009 drama You’re Beautiful.

There is little more exhilarating than the quick-cutting archival footage of Giorgio Moroder swiveling in his studio chair to another piece of equipment, probably to do something really boring and pain-staking on it. I think i’d like to spend my life in a studio, but one with banks of humming machinery, not one sole computer, no matter how much it makes everything easier. Better me there than on the dance floor where these constructions are intended.